Nader ballot suit a long shot
BOISE – Most Idaho counties already are printing their ballots for the Nov. 2 election, making independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s last-minute ballot access lawsuit a long shot at best.
“Clerks around the state are printing and … sending absentee ballots,” Secretary of State Ben Ysursa said Tuesday. “We need to get those ballots out to folks.”
Nader’s legal challenge hit its first setback right away, when 4th District Judge Deborah Bail declined this week to sign a temporary restraining order stopping Idaho counties from printing ballots for the November election. Instead, Bail scheduled a hearing in the case for Oct. 6.
In Kootenai County, absentee ballots already are being printed, County Clerk Dan English said Tuesday. “We expect to get them tomorrow, and will immediately begin processing them to do our first mailing,” he said. “For sure, the military ones will go out by the end of the week.”
Nader fell short of making the Idaho ballot when he turned in 4,388 valid signatures on the Aug. 24 deadline. He needed at least 5,016 to qualify for the ballot – 1 percent of the votes cast in Idaho in the last presidential election.
But in a lawsuit filed in state 4th District Court on Monday, Nader charged that county clerks improperly disqualified hundreds of additional signatures his supporters submitted. They collected 3,101 that were invalidated by clerks.
“We were really surprised by the high number of invalid signatures in Idaho,” said Nader campaign spokesman Kevin Zeese. “I just think there’s something really wrong in how that occurred.”
In their lawsuit, Nader supporters said they compared their invalidated Ada County signatures to a computer database of registered Ada County voters last weekend, and found 339 that showed up in both. An additional 559 matched names in the database, but had different addresses.
“There is no requirement that the address on the petition match the address on the voter registration rolls,” Nader attorney Matthew Campbell argued in court documents.
But that’s exactly how Idaho validates signatures of registered voters – by name and address.
In fact, a federal judge four years ago upheld Idaho’s election laws as constitutional when Nader challenged them after he failed to make the Idaho ballot that year. U.S. Magistrate Judge Mikel Williams ruled that Idaho’s requirements were reasonable, and that diligent signature-gatherers should collect extra signatures to make sure they have enough that match current registered addresses for voters.
In his Sept. 18, 2000, ruling, Williams noted that in the 1992 election, independent presidential candidates Lenora Fulani, Ross Perot and Bo Gritz all made the Idaho ballot by meeting the same requirements.
Campbell said, “The contention of the suit is that enough valid names were on there that he (Nader) should be placed on the ballot. … I think the campaign is certainly optimistic that they have a good claim.”
If Nader were to win his challenge after Idaho’s ballots already had been printed and distributed, Campbell said, “They might have to reprint them, I don’t know.”
English said, “For an election this size, that wouldn’t be good news. … If we had to do something, somehow we’d do it.”
After Nader failed to make the Idaho ballot in 2000, he ran as a write-in, and garnered 12.5 percent of the vote. That was 12,292 votes – nearly three times as many as Libertarian Party candidate Harry Browne and more than eight times as many as Constitution Party candidate Howard Phillips, both of whom were on the ballot.
“A lot of his views would be popular with Idahoans,” Zeese said. “I think they should let Ralph Nader on the ballot.”
According to the Nader campaign Web site, Nader is currently on the ballot in 32 states, but is in litigation over 12 of those. He’s also in litigation in seven other states where he’s not on the ballot, including Idaho.
Zeese blamed Democrats for most of those lawsuits, saying, “The Democrats have a national strategy; that rather than compete with us on the issues, they’re trying to keep us off the ballot.”
But he said Idaho is “atypical,” because Democrats aren’t involved in the challenge. Most of Idaho’s elected officials, including Ysursa, who is named in the lawsuit, are Republicans.
English, a Democrat, said he’s heard both sides of those arguments. “I’ve read lots of reports that the Republicans are funding his efforts to challenge the Democrats, because they think that’s a pretty good idea to drain off a point or two.”
Ysursa said with thousands of Idahoans deployed to the Middle East or elsewhere in military service, officials are particularly concerned that absentee ballots go out on time.
“The federal voting assistance program recommends 45 days ballot transit time for overseas ballots,” Ysursa said. “It’s a pretty long process. … It’s disconcerting to us, these late challenges to ballot status. They knew that Aug. 24 was the deadline four years ago.”
He added, “We’re going to defend it vigorously. We think the clerks, as usual, have done their job in a proper manner.”